What do I mean when I use the term R’s and D’s? I am talking about party insiders in positions of power in DC, and insiders who have direct access to the people in these positions of power. I’m not talking about you and me. We are outside the party structure. We are only important to the insider R’s and D’s on election day.
The trick for each party is to get voters (you and me) to think the insiders of the other party are the wolfs, while at the same time portraying themselves as the sheepdog. Unfortunately we have bought into this trick. In reality the R’s and the D’s both want government power to grow. Increasing government power benefits insiders of both parties. When Government grows you and I are forced to give up our freedom and our money. Insiders will choose any policy that increases the power of Government.
We are reaching a point where enough of us are finally realizing that the battle is between us and the insiders of both parties. We should be fighting them not each other.
I found these cartoons of Ralph E. Wolf and Sam Sheepdog. It shows the R and D political model that we have been duped into accepting. Ralph E Wolf and Sam Sheepdog seem to be on opposite sides. But they are on the same side. Each one is just playing his role at any given moment.
I’ve figured out over the years that these congressional hearings are strictly political theater. One side trying to make political hay by hammering the person testifying, and the other side trying their best to protect him [which means protect their ideology}. Nothing of consequence ever comes out of these kinds of hearings other than political posturing.
APOLOGY NOT ACCEPTED MR. GRUBER
Here is Jonathan Gruber’s opening statement in front of a congressional committee concerning his comments about The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Watch these comments under oath with his lawyer present.
Now watch his comments about the ACA when he felt he could speak freely.
Which Jonathan Gruber is telling the truth?
TORTURED DEFINITION OF TORTURE
In the stories I’ve read about the Senate report on torture that was released today, water boarding and sleep deprivation are the techniques mentioned as torture. They are also called, ‘harsh’ or ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques. They can’t be both. My problem with this whole report is we can’t agree on what is and is not torture and what is and is not an interrogation technique. Pulling out fingernails, hamstringing, thumbscrews, tarring and feathering, pulling or drilling teeth, beating or physical violence, breaking bones, scalping, knee capping, and branding are what I would call torture. What John McCain went through in Viet Nam was torture. Sleep deprivation and water boarding are not torture.
Many of these Senators who are planting their flag on the political high ground against torture knew that these enhanced interrogation techniques were going on during the Bush Presidency. It is much easier to be righteously indignant after the fact than it is to do what you consider to be the right thing at the very moment it happens. Always remember, politicians view everything through the lens of politics.
The recent bashing of Burger King about their merger with Tim Hortons is nothing more than political theater being staged for the upcoming November elections. The political strategy of: divide us into as many groups as possible, pit us against each other using propaganda, and set up the false narrative that Government is the only solution to the made up problem is in full swing. In this case it’s the usual tried and true tactic of the haves vs. the have-nots.
POLITICAL PROPAGANDA / HOME OF THE WHOPPER
A corporate tax inversions is simply a corporation merging with an overseas company from a country that has a lower tax rate. The President has been propagandizing inversions lately for political reasons. If you don’t believe me watch this short video ( if you can get through the first minute). The words used, the tone of his voice, and the misinformation in this video would make Joseph Goebbels envious.
Tactics like this aren’t new. In May of 2013 Apple was brought in front of a Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing to be lambasted about their tax practices. These hearings are always political theater. But in this case something different happened. Senator Rand Paul took the unpopular stance of defending Apple.
Which video do you believe is factually true of just a piece of propaganda. We have to be able to sift through the propaganda and rhetoric of both sides in order to get to the truth.
TAX INVERSION MATHMATICS
The Federal Government will collect $20 billion less in tax revenue over a decade if tax inversions aren’t halted (read here). That’s only $2 billion a year out of a $3.7 trillion yearly Federal budget, or .001 percent of the budget. If you add the fact that the Fed is still printing $25 billion a month, you see the insignificant amount of money involved. Politicians will propagandize inversions by saying, “this will ‘cost tax payers’ blah blah blah”, or something about corporations, “trying to avoid paying their fair share”. This is purely political posturing through propaganda.
PERVERSE BED FELLOWS
Here is an article titled, Buffett Burger King Funds Flip Obama’s Inversion Calculus. It is interesting to see all the corners these crony capitalists and politicians get paint into because of their incestuous relationship with each other. Here are some excerpts.
“Billionaire Warren Buffett was an ally of President Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and the force behind Obama’s “Buffett Rule,” designed to increase tax bills for the wealthiest Americans. Now, the second-richest man in the U.S. has dented Obama’s effort to stamp out corporate inversions.”
“The danger for Democrats is that Buffett’s investment in the burger-fries-and-a-Coke company’s inversion might flip that calculation and make it politically easier for other corporations to follow suit without suffering repudiation from the public or the White House.”
“That’s because Buffett in the past has served as a sort of unofficial adviser to Obama on business and financial matters, someone whose stamp of approval has offered political cover when the president has been accused of being anti-business or of unfairly targeting the wealthy….If Obama were to question the Burger King deal publicly now, it would mean putting himself at odds with Buffett.”
“I proposed closing this unpatriotic tax loophole for good,” Obama said in his weekly address on July 26. “Rather than double-down on the top-down economics that let a fortunate few play by their own rules, let’s embrace an economic patriotism..”
“…Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew called on Congress to pass a law requiring that foreign shareholders account for 50 percent of the ownership of a new merger between a U.S. company and a foreign one … The administration wants that change made retroactive to May…. legislation taking effect after the president signs it into law — could have the perverse effect of encouraging corporations to act more quickly, negotiate new deals and rush to close those transactions before the bill is enacted,” Lew wrote. “It would be a mistake for Congress to pass anti-inversion legislation that creates a race against the clock and encourages more, not fewer, inversions.”
I want to disinfect myself after reading that.
GEORGE McGOVERN: FREE MARKET CONVERT?
Former Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern talked about his experience dealing with Government regulations and mandates after he retired from politics and became a business owner, in this article titled What I Know Now: Nibbled To Death. Here are a few excerpts from the article.
“The second lesson I learned by owning the Stratford Inn is that legislators and government regulators must more carefully consider the economic and management burdens we have been imposing on U.S. business.”
“….if I were back in the U.S. Senate or in the White House, I would ask a lot of questions before I voted for any more burdens on the thousands of struggling businesses across the nation….. I would ask whether specific legislation exacts a managerial price exceeding any overall benefit it might produce. What are the real economic and social gains of the legislation when compared with the costs and competitive handicaps it imposes on businesspeople?”
“…While running my struggling hotel, I never once missed a payroll. What happens to the people who counted on that, and to their families and community, when an owner goes under? Those questions worry me, and they ought to worry all of us who love this country as a land of promise and opportunity.”
I think this article was written around 1993. If Senator McGovern thought regulations and mandates were bad then, what would he think about them if he were alive today. Senator McGovern was a big Government leftist, but he realized at some point regulations and mandates destroy economic activity. [Or did he just want regulations to be at a level in which his business could survive? Would he have written this this article if regulations weren’t at a level that affected his business? His business just happened to be the submarginal business, what if it had been the supramarginal business?}.
CONCLUSION
“The economy” is what results when each individual is free to make decisions on what to produce, consume, save, or exchange according to what he values at any particular time. Outside of protecting property rights, contracts, and torts: government interventions hamper the decision-making by individuals, by definition hurting the economy.
Government intervention substitutes the decisions of individual politicians and bureaucrats, for the decisions of free individuals in the market, creating a lower overall standard of living, and individuals who are less satisfied.
Politicians are always performing in the political theater, because they realize that the political process is the only way they can get in positions of power to enforce their superior wisdom on the masses. We have to realize this, and be able to weed out the propaganda from the facts if we are going to be able to turn the big Government ship around.
The President and Congress are the actors and we are the audience as the shutdown, debt ceiling, and obamacare political theater is being played out in Washington D. C. We must always remember that everything a politician does and says has to be analyzed from the stand point of what each politician values most. For most politicians they value staying in, and gaining more power above everything. Some may have other motives, but, if we start with this basic understanding of what they are really trying to accomplish instead of believing what they say they are trying to do, our odds of seeing through the political B. S. go up exponentially. Let’s take a look the shutdown, the debt ceiling, and Obamacare from the perspective of their political self-interest.
THE SHUTDOWN
The U.S. hasn’t passed a budget since the President signed an omnibus spending bill in April of 2009. Since then we have been operating on continuing resolutions. When a budget is passed it recommends spending levels for mandatory and discretionary programs. In order for a discretionary program to be funded, an appropriations bill has to be passed, but a mandatory program, like social security, is funded without an appropriations bill. When an appropriations bill runs out and there has been no budget passed, a continuing resolution (CR) is passed which funds discretionary programs at current or expanded levels. If a CR isn’t passed, discretionary programs are cut to essential personal only. Mandatory programs are always funded. As boring as that was, we should have a basic understanding of how your tax dollars are appropriated. Now let’s look at this through the political theater prism.
Each actor is trying to convince you, the audience, that the other actor is responsible for the Government shutdown. They think winning this blame game helps them in their quest to stay in, and gain more power. The President is attempting to make the shut down have as negative an effect on as many people as possible because he feels he can convince us, with the help of the main stream media, that republicans are responsible for all the negative effects that he chose to inflict on us. He probably never thought he would be in this position because he figured the republicans would surrender like they always do when they get attacked. The only reason they haven’t surrendered is because Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee have inspired small Government individuals to let their voices be heard. If public opinion wasn’t so strong this would have been over weeks ago.
Only about 20% of the Government is shut down, and if the shut down continues, people will begin to figure out we can get along just fine with smaller Government. Government is not the end all and be all that politicians try to convince us it is.
THE DEBT CEILING
Most of the R’s and D’s, in this recent debt ceiling debate, have been on the other side of the debate during previous debt ceiling debates. This point shows it’s all about politics. We are told by central planning progressives, that the U.S. will default when the debt ceiling is reached, this is a lie. The Government is legally bound, by section 4 of the fourteenth amendment of the constitution, to pay the interest on their debt. The Government takes in over $200 billion a month in taxes and pays close to $20 billion a month in interest on the debt. They will have more than enough to pay off the monthly interest on the debt. Politicians want the debt ceiling raised because they don’t want to make the hard decisions about what they will have to cut out of a $3.7 trillion budget, if they are forced to only spend the $2.5 trillion confiscated from taxpayers. This is the equivalent of passing a balanced budget amendment without passing a balanced budget amendment. Our credit rating would be better because we wouldn’t be going deeper in debt, and the Fed wouldn’t have to electronically print the counterfeit money that is presently being used to purchase Government debt. These are all good things for the country as a whole, but not being able to spend would be the last thing a politician wants. Their power comes from their ability to make rules, and redistribute money. Less money leads to smaller Government and neither party wants less power.
OBAMACARE
Here is the simple truth about Obama care. It is the final step to a single payer government-run health care system. That is the progressives ultimate goal. These central planners want insurance premiums to rise. They also want employers to drop their insurance plans, dump their employees onto the Government exchanges, and pay the fine, or tax, or whatever it is. They want private health insurance to go by the wayside and be replaced by Government insurance, although Government insurance isn’t insurance in the true sense of the word. Government insurance is nothing more than a transfer payment from producers to nonproducers.
Single payer is something progressives have wanted for decades, so it’s more important to them than their political skins. They will do anything, lie, cheat, beg, borrow or steal, (oh yeah, they already have), to implement a single payer system.
CONCLUSION
When it comes to politicians, you have to know what they value most in order to understand what they’re doing. Politicians, 1) value their power most and will do anything to keep it, 2) value their ideology or vision above everything, including keeping their position of power, or 3) honestly think they are doing what is right. Keep these in mind every time you here a politician open his mouth.
"THE COORDINATION OF MENS ACTIVITIES THROUGH CENTRAL PLANNING OR THROUGH VOLUNTARY COOPERATION ARE ROADS GOING IN VERY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, THE FIRST TO SERFDOM AND POVERTY THE SECOND TO FREEDOM AND PLENTY."
"THERE IS NO SUBTLER, NO SURER MEANS OF OVERTURNING THE EXISTING BASIS OF SOCIETY THAN TO DEBAUCH THE CURRENCY. THE PROCESS ENGAGES ALL THE HIDDEN FORCES OF ECONOMIC LAW ON THE SIDE OF DESTRUCTION, AND DOES IT IN A MANNER WHICH NOT ONE MAN IN A MILLION IS ABLE TO DIAGNOSE."
Most Recent Quote
F.A. Hayek - "Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunity it provides for unforseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom."
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Matthew McCaffrey - "Building a freer society means winning the battle of ideas, not the empty contests put on by the central Government every four years. Freedom is never obtained by endorsing the least offensive applicant for the position of chief villain."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle system of property that is hampered, guided, and regulated by government is in itself contradictory and illogical. Any attempt to introduce it in earnest must lead to a crisis from which either Socialism or Capitalism alone can emerge."
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F. A. Hayek - "While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization. It may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed."
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Murray Rothbard - "The market promotes and rewards the skills of production and voluntary cooperation. The Government enterprise promotes the skills of mass coercion and bureaucratic submission...and those who get to the top will be those with the most skill in that particular task."
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John Adams - "Government is instituted for the common good: for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people. And not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men..."
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Milton Friedman - "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
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Chris Rossini - "The state is a monster that destroys. Those who gain control of the levers, choose the targets."
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Murray Rothbard -"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics...but it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
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Murray Rothbard -"Democracy can be only a possible route toward a free society rather than an attribute of it. In a purely free society there would be nothing for democratic electors to vote about."
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Robert Bradley Jr. - "When Government tries to pick winners and losers, it typically picks losers. Why? Because the Free market consumers pick winners to leave the losers for Government."
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Benito Mussolini - "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Men must choose between the market economy and socialism....some agency must determine what should be produced. If it is not the consumer by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the Government by compulsion."
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F. A. Hayek - "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know, about what they imagine they can design."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Any intervention in the market (by the state) must direct resources away from how private owners would have employed them and toward how state officials and their economic advisers would like to see them employed."
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Henry Hazlitt - "The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible....the real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces."
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Murray Rothbard - "Whether or not man lives at the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and consumers goods.... Free markets tend to lead to abundance for all of its participants.... violent intervention in the market and a hegemonic society tend to lead to general poverty."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Inflation and credit expansion are the means to obfuscate the fact that there prevails a nature-given scarcity of the material things on which the satisfaction of human wants depends. The main concern of capitalists private enterprise it to remove this scarcity as much as possible and to provide a continuously improving standard of living for an increasing population.....but however remarkable these improvements may be, there will always be a strict limit to the amount that can be consumed without reducing the capital available for the continuation and, even more, the expansion of production."
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Ludwig von Mises - " It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of Governments. Ideologically, it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights."
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Murray Rothbard - "To reduce the working population while the consuming population remains undiminished is to lower the standard of living."
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Murray Rothbard - "Increasing the money supply confers no social benefit. It relieves no economic scarcity. It simply benefits some at the expense of others."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments, they must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe."
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Milton Friedman - "A society that puts equality- in the sense of equality of outcome- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."
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F. A. Hayek - "It has already been suggested that it is not necessary, for the working of this free market capitalist system, that anybody should understand it. But people are not likely to let it work if they do not understand it."
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C. S. Lewis - "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
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Ludwig von Mises - "For the naive mind there is something miraculous in the issuance of fiat money. A magic word spoken by the Government creates out of nothing a thing which can be exchanged against any merchandize a man would like to get."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Many think that governments are free to achieve all they aim at without being restrained by an inexorable regularity in the sequence of economic phenomena....they maintain that the state is God."
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George Gilder - "Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to men who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work."
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Thomas Sowell - "Perhaps the greatest achievement of market economies is in economizing on the amount of knowledge needed to produce a given economic result. That is also their greatest political vulnerability."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Anti capitalistic policies sabotage the operation of the capitalist system of the market economy. The failure of interventionism does not demonstrate the necessity of adopting socialism. It merely exposes the futility of interventionism. All those evils which the self-styled "progressives" interpret as evidence of the failure off capitalism are the outcome of their allegedly beneficial interference with the market."
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F.A. Hayek - "The battle for freedom must be won over and over again, the socialists of all parties must be persuaded or defeated if they and we are to remain free men."
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F. A. Hayek - "Planning, or central direction of economic activity, presupposes the existence of common ideals and common values; and the degree to which planning can be carried is limited to the extent to which agreement on such a common scale of values can be obtained or enforced."
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Thomas Sowell - "In political competition accurate knowledge has no decisive competitive advantage, because what is being sold is not an end result but a plausible belief about a complex process"
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Thomas Sowell - " Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance one's own moral adventures via social programs, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor, while allowing others the same freedom and dignity as oneself, so that they can make their own choices with their own earnings is considered pandering to greed. Greed for power is no less dangerous than greed for money, and has historically shed far more blood in the process."
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Peter Earle - "In a world of infinate desires and limited means, choices must be made; a study of history and economics reveals that, while markets make no promises, they never lie. The only choice is whether distribution, or redistribution as the case may be, is to be accomplished by the organic, apportioning hand of the price system, or by the corrupt, spoilative claw of states."
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Thomas Jefferson - "....To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with public debt....we must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude....if we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.... if we can prevent the Government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
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F. A. Hayek - "The democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans."
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Jean Baptiste Say - "...The encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce, for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption; and we have seen that production alone, furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of Good Government to stimulate production, of bad Government to encourage consumption."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments."
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Thomas Sowell - "What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials."
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Thomas Sowell - "The market is simply the freedom to choose among many existing or still to be created possibilities. The Government establishes an army or a post office as the answer to a given problem.... The diversity of personal tastes insures that no given institution will become the answer to a human problem in the market."
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Thomas Sowell - "Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics."
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Paul Craig Roberts - "We should all be thankful to the Soviets, because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough."
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Alexis de Tocqueville - "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man, socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality, but notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
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George Gilder - "The Real Issue is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism, between creative excellence and covetous "fairness", between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it'.
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Thomas Jefferson - "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
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Judge Leonard Hand - "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire, it cannot be preserved under the ideology of Government omnipotence."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution."
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H.L. Menken - "Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is an advance auction on the sale of stolen goods"
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F.A. Hayek - "Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's Government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Economics is the science of how we use social institutions such as private property and voluntary exchange on free markets to make the best use of scarce resources. The printing press tries to do away with scarcity."
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Thomas Sowell - "The God like approach to social policy ignores the diversity of values and the cost of agreement among human beings."
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Henry Hazlitt - "Whenever men are allowed liberty, and freedom of choice, they will make mistakes. Liberty is not a guarantee of omniscience. But neither are the mistakes of free men a valid excuse to take away their liberty, and impose Government controls in its stead, on the ground that all wisdom and disinterestedness resides in the people who are going to do the controlling."
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Thomas Sowell - "Nothing is easier than to confuse broader powers with deeper insight. But almost by definition, those with the broadest powers are the most remote from the specific knowledge needed for either deciding, or for knowing, the actual consequences of their decisions."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Credit expansion is the Government's foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether to finance lavish Government spending."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Economic history is a long record of Government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics."
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Chaderov - "Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by it's avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus in pulling society down it pulls itself down."
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Thomas Sowell - "If an informed citizenry is the foundation of democratic Government, than an uninformed citizenry is a danger."
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Thomas Sowell - "The free market works best when there is a level playing field but politicians win more votes by tilting the playing field to favor particular groups."
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Thomas Sowell - "However dramatic or attractive a particular vision may be, ultimately everyone must live in the world of reality. To the extent that reality has been filtered to fit a vision, this filtered information is a misleading guide to making decisions in an unforgiving reality, to which we must all adjust because it is not going to adjust to us."
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Thomas Sowell - "Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name "Social Justice"."
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Murray Rothbard - "Bureaucracy incompetent enough to plan a stationary system, is vastly more incompetent at planning a progressing one."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Freedom is incompatible with equality of wealth and income. Men are born unequal and it is precisely their inequality that generates social cooperation and civilization."
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Murray Rothbard - "Government subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation (plundering)."
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Francisco Capella - "The right of property is a negative right of noninterference. Humans do not have natural positive rights that imply that others must do something for them, and there is no natural duties towards others (present and future). Positive rights and duties arise by means of contracts."
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Victor Davis Hanson - "Social justice sees the Government's proper moral obligation not as ensuring equality out of the starting gate, but as guaranteeing that we will all reach the finish line at the same exact moment."
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F.A. Hayek - "A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a Government with totalitarian powers."
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Thomas Sowell - "People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge."
"Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance."
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Thomas Sowell - "People have to be aware of the dangers in letting economic decisions be made through political processes."
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Winston Churchill - "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
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George Gilder - "Socialist and totalitarian Governments are doomed to support the past, because creativity is unpredictable, it is also uncontrollable. If the politicians want to have central planning and command, they can not have dynamism and life. A managed economy is almost by definition a barren one.
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George Gilder - "The ambitious agenda of contemporary liberalism simply ensures that Government will do nothing well, except to expand itself as an obstacle of growth and innovation. Government best supports the future by refraining as much as possible from trying unduly to shape it."
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Francisco Capella - "Markets are never perfect because human beings are limited in their abilities; proposing state fixes to alleged problems that individuals cannot solve freely seems to forget that the state is also made up of humans; and perhaps not the best ones. ( Bureaucrats are not disinterested angels, and the worst might get to the top.)"
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George Washington - "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force, like fire it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I think we have more machinery of Government than is necessary, to many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I sincerely believe with you that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, it's but swindling futurity on a large scale."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "The two enemies of the people are criminals and Government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT 